About Counseling 

Grief is a river that leads to your healing. 

If you are reading this, you are likely navigating those turbulent currents as best as possible. But since there is no available training manual, it is easy to feel alone and overwhelmed, especially in a culture that is strongly grief-avoidant.  

The experience of drowning is common as you deal with the unspeakably painful emotional vortex, which seems to pull you to the bottom of this river. Hence, the need for support. 

A river guide can be helpful. 

Your experience of loss – whatever that may be – is as snowflake unique as you are.  

While this is an ancient river, no one has traveled it just like you, with your particular mix of body, mind, and spirit. My role as your river guide is twofold: 

First, I want to remind you to trust the current. Second, I want to help you learn to keep your head above water and steer clear of rocks and logs as best as possible.  

We must meet loss with unique internal resources because loss is a uniquely powerful experience. Identifying and developing those is the centerpiece of the counseling journey. 

Our work together will focus on helping you develop a more conscious and engaged relationship with your grief experience. Specifically, I will use mindfulness, body-based wisdom, and explorative dialogue to help you navigate this challenging inner terrain.  

Because grief impacts every nook and cranny of our being, we need to adopt a holistic and comprehensive approach. We need to be able to meet grief wherever it animates us most in this moment – our mind, our body, and our heart.  

Ultimately, you govern the direction of the work. You follow your own thread. 

Learning to embrace grief is a transformational opportunity. 

When you and I decide to travel the grief path together, to be temporary companions on this sacred journey, we are guided by one primary inquiry: 

What is there to learn HERE? What are the most essential qualities of being a sincere student of grief? It is a long list, but they certainly include patience, trust, curiosity, courage, and tons of self-compassion – to name a few. Such qualities provide the ground upon which we explore your path together. 

In a sense, each one is a unique and particular facet of your inner resource bank. Functioning together, they represent the vehicle with which you navigate your journey. 

Over time, learning deepens. 

As that learning increases, you naturally discover that your loss experience is becoming more workable. You notice more space for the process to unfold. Less claustrophobic. You have developed new inner capacities – body, mind, and heart – that support your journey down the grief river.  

Of course, you still get tossed around by the currents, but you have learned critical navigational skills that help you spend more time ABOVE the water than below! 

Fundamentally, our work together is about creating a strong and safe container in which you can learn to befriend and inhabit your grief. Inhabiting grief is like eating. First, we taste, then chew, then swallow, then digest. It is a natural process; we need to support its movement.  

As that occurs, baby step by step, you become more capable of receiving its wisdom teachings. Organically, grief becomes your trustworthy ally – a faithful friend who lives in your heart and lights the way home.